Editorial: In the new world order, some things unchanged

File photo by Mark Lennihan / Associated PressThis May 23 photo shows the pre-market price for Facebook at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York. The Nasdaq stock exchange announced Wednesday that it plans to hand out $40 million in cash and credit to reimburse investment firms that got ensnared by technical problems with trading Facebook stock.

So much for Tech Boom 2.0.

Kayak Software Corp., a travel Internet company that was widely believed to have targeted Memorial Day for the start of its so-called roadshow, the sales pitch that precedes a company’s initial public stock offering, has now slowed down its rush to the market.

There’s been no date set, and no one has been saying much of anything.

Kayak’s lead bank in the IPO? Morgan Stanley, the investment giant that was behind Facebook’s less-than-sterling market debut last month.

Anecdotal evidence and talk around Wall Street has many companies wary of dipping their toes into the obviously choppy waters in the current environment.

What can average investors take away from the recent developments? For starters: Now, it would seem – again – is a good time to be very wary of tech stocks.

Following the Facebook flop, there was a decent amount of blame making the rounds. The company itself, as is the practice at such times, has been silent, but others have spent buckets of words wondering what went wrong. Morgan Stanley has gotten a hefty share of the blame. Some have pointed to first-day computer glitches at Nasdaq, the listing exchange. Others have looked to Facebook itself, wondering aloud if top executives at the company, working with Morgan Stanley chieftains, simply priced the stock too high – and offered far too many shares for sale – at the start.

If that’s the case, then the answer, the real bottom line, comes back to plain, old-fashioned greed. Rather than making unimaginable piles of money, some may have thought, let’s make even more. With 900 million users, how could Facebook go wrong?

By seeing them all as genuine friends – that’s one way. And by overinflating the company’s value, economic and otherwise.